|
on Islamic Finance |
|
Issue of 2021‒01‒18
four papers chosen by Mohamed Mohamed Tolba Said International Islamic University Malaysia |
| By: | International Monetary Fund |
| Abstract: | The authorities have requested a three-month extension of the Extended Credit Facility (ECF) arrangement set to expire on December 5, 2020. The three-year arrangement was approved by the Executive Board on December 6, 2017 with access of SDR 115.92 million (90 percent of quota); additional access of SDR 20.24 million (about 15.7 percent of quota) was approved on September 2, 2020. On April 23, 2020, the Board also approved the disbursement of SDR 95.68 million (about 74.3 percent of quota) under the Rapid Credit Facility to address urgent balance of payment needs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. |
| Date: | 2020–12–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfscr:2020/315&r=all |
| By: | Abosedra, Salah; Fakih, Ali; Haimoun, Nathir |
| Abstract: | While most civil wars seem to have an economic basis, they are generally pushed by political, ethnic, and religious differences. This paper attempts to identify the drivers of the Syrian civil war of 2011 by investigating the role of ethnic divisions in starting a conflict. We integrate a variety of variables such as excluded population, power-sharing, anocracy, ethnic groups in addition to a number of economic factors. The main results indicate that ethnicity does not seem to be a very important factor in starting both the civil and ethnic conflict in Syria, but it shows that the lack of power-sharing to be the most significant factor. Therefore, where power in Syria was not inclusive and shared among different demographic segments, such as religious or urban groups, it created upheavals between different groups, as some groups disidentify with the state, paving the way to causing the conflict. Economic factors also provide an explanation of the onset of conflicts in Syria. The paper offers detailed policy suggestions that could serve as a recovery mechanism for the Syrian crisis and a preventive measurement for its reoccurrence. |
| Keywords: | Armed Conflicts,Ethnic Conflicts,Ethnic Groups,Power-Sharing,Syria |
| JEL: | D74 F51 H56 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:754&r=all |
| By: | Fasani, Francesco (Queen Mary, University of London); Mazza, Jacopo (European Commission, Joint Research Centre) |
| Abstract: | We provide a first timely assessment of the pandemic crisis impact on the labour market prospects of immigrant workers in Europe by proposing a novel measure of their exposure to employment risk. We characterize migrants' occupations along four dimensions related to the role of workers' occupations in the response to the pandemic, the contractual protection they enjoy, the possibility of performing their job from home and the resilience of the industry in which they are employed. We show that our measure of employment risk closely predicts actual employment losses observed in European countries after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. We estimate that, within industries and occupations, Extra-EU migrants and women are exposed to higher risk of unemployment than native men and that women are losing jobs at higher rates than equally exposed men. According to our estimates, more than 9 million immigrants in the EU14+UK area are exposed to a high risk of becoming unemployed due to the pandemic crisis, 1.3 million of which are facing a very high risk. |
| Keywords: | employment risk, COVID-19, key occupations |
| JEL: | F22 J61 J20 |
| Date: | 2020–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13963&r=all |
| By: | Kayoko Ishii (Faculty of Economics, Keio University); Mao Nakayama (Faculty of Economics, Keio University); Isamu Yamamoto (Faculty of Business and Commerce, Keio University) |
| Abstract: | This study clarified the characteristics of workers who have smoothly shifted from office work to working from home under the COVID-19 pandemic, and investigated its impact on income, working hours and workers' anxiety, using the employees' longitudinal data collected by the internet survey in April and May 2020 in Japan. The results of the regression analyses showed that those who are university-graduated, regular employees, high earners, working in large companies, and working in companies which have well-human resource management had high possibility of switching to working from home under the pandemic, even after controlling for each job's potentialities of working from home. This implied not only that those workers tended to occupy jobs which can be done from home, but also even if their jobs have the same potential to work from home, those who are less educated, non-regular employees and less earners had less choice to work from home. This study also investigated the impact of working from home on income, working hours and anxiety. To control for inverse causal effect, we conducted the instrumental variable methods. The analyses showed that working from home had significant effects of preventing from large earning loss and large decrease of working hours, but there was no significant effect on anxiety. In conclusion, it was shown that there was inequality of choices of working from home between workers' characteristics under the pandemic, and also the implementation of working from home under the pandemic would produce another inequality of income and working hours. |
| Keywords: | COVID-19, work from home, inequality, employment status, anxiety |
| JEL: | I31 J22 J71 |
| Date: | 2020–12–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:keo:dpaper:2020-025&r=all |